When I was 14, I used to hang around all these sketchy script kiddie forums. I learned assembly off some crapily written assembly.txt guide, with the ASCII art of the author at the top and all. Fast forward two years later.
A buddy of mine from IRC links me a webpage like he usually does, most of the time it's a static HTML file buried deep into the file structure of some large corporate site. This file was different, it was the CC database for a huge site.
Few weeks later police kick my door down, seize most of my personal electronics, and I have yet to hear from them or see my equipment.
Do you think the feds managed to track you down from the file access? Or do you think your friend, prompted by the feds to disclose his "hacking ring", implicated you?
I ask because it's pretty easy to find carding forums on Tor, to the point that I can't imagine the police bust the door down of everyone they can identify as having glanced at a CC dump.
You should be able to retain a lawyer who would be able to send a letter/etc to get your stuff back assuming you still have the search warrant information used to seize it. Admittedly that requires the stuff seized to be worth it.
When I was 14-16, I used to host forums for different online gaming communities that attracted DDoS. A few times I managed to get myself inside of the C&C, but I was almost always already in contact with the hosting provider by that point and basically was able to get them to shut it down immediately once I had proof of what it was. I was always scared something like what you described would happen, because very frequently the attacks were larger than DDoS attacks described in world news. I guess the people attacking my servers didn't use their botnet for anything more criminal than harassment and generating ad revenue.
A buddy of mine from IRC links me a webpage like he usually does, most of the time it's a static HTML file buried deep into the file structure of some large corporate site. This file was different, it was the CC database for a huge site.
Few weeks later police kick my door down, seize most of my personal electronics, and I have yet to hear from them or see my equipment.